The British Drilling Association (BDA) is the UK's trade association for the ground drilling industry.

Accessing the UK's Borehole Data

19th December 2018

Accessing
the UK's Borehole Data

Everyone loves boreholes at
BGS, but how good are we in the sector at preserving and re-using valuable (and
mostly public sector funded) information about the subsurface? A plethora of
articles have recently been published about this topic, this one gives an
insight into what the British Geological Survey has been doing to handle the
increasing amount of digital data and also about a an initiative funded by i3P,
called Dig to Share trying to improve the workflows and accelerate the
unlocking of huge amounts of legacy data hidden away and unavailable to make
more informed decisions about planning and design of infrastructure projects.

The National Geoscience Data
Centre (NGDC) which is provided by the British Geological Survey (BGS) collects
and preserves geoscientific data.The
collection of these unique data assets contribute to a greater understanding of
the subsurface which is crucial for managing hazards, understanding natural
resources and planning the development of infrastructure both below and above
surface.

A number of the collections
are deposited under statute, however, many are voluntary deposits.The UK's Borehole collection holds over 1
million borehole records (many dating back to the 1800s with two of our oldest
records pictured below) and stems from ground investigations conducted as part
of development and construction work.Boreholes drilled for water resources or mining purposes are required to
be deposited with the BGS under statute, but those drilled for civil
engineering purposes are not.It is
estimated that industry drill more than 20,000 boreholes per year (average cost
of £4,000 per borehole).BGS estimate
that 80% of borehole data is missing.If
the data was captured, accessible and therefore re-used it would create
significant costs and efficiency savings, as well as creating an information
resource to fuel data models and analytical models.It is estimated that better data sharing
could save HS2 Phase 2 £10 million.

Despite the BGS borehole
archive being accessed thousands of times a day and the availability of the new
Deposits Portal, donations of good quality digital data remained very low. This
is where the Dig to Share project (a collaboration between BGS, Atkins, Morgan
Sindall and Fluxx, supported by HS2 and funded by i3P) came into play over
summer.

The team has flipped the
approach to finding a solution to the missing borehole data on its head.
Instead of jumping straight to a technical solution, several weeks were spent
talking to actual customers of the database (both consumers and producers of GI
data) to understand their current experience, barriers to contribution and
ideas for improvements. Armed with this insight, elements from the lean start-up
methodology, a "fail fast" approach to product design, and running a series of
experiments to test customer response to our solution are now being deployed.

The research showed that
technology was not in fact a significant barrier to customer behaviour. Instead,
inertia, permissions and the pace of the construction process were the main
reasons individuals cited for not contributing to sharing data, although most
could articulate the value of the centralised BGS database, hosting AGS data.

The experiments will aim to
validate three main things: Desirability (Do customers want this?), Viability
(Does the business model work?), Feasibility (Can we actually deliver the solution?).

My engaging with customers throughout the
process, as opposed to just the start or not at all, the project has real data
to back up future investment decisions. A solution will be built that is much
more closely aligned to actual, rather than perceived user need, and it should
drive larger changes in success metrics like number of borehole records in the
database.

The first set of experiments
will seek to prove or disprove hypotheses around awareness at both the grass
roots and board level of i3P organisations; can commitment by partner
organisations, such as internal policy changes, influence the behaviour of
individual employees?

This experimentation approach
is an iterative, ongoing process that the Dig to Share team will continue to
manage, review and adapt as they learn more about how to drive collaboration
across the construction industry. If you would like to get involved, please
contact the Dig to Share team, via Sophie Payne at digtoshare@atkinsglobal.com.You can follow our project updates on Twitter
@digtoshare and on our website https://www.i3p.org.uk/projects/digtoshare/.